My cousin Marie-Claire, who was in my class, already owned the book and had told me all about it. But because the book was new and in hard cover with color illustrations — which meant that it was expensive and likely beyond my parents’ means — Maman told me to put the book back in its place on the shelf. I refused.
“Please, Maman. I’ve wanted it now for so long. I want to fly like Le Petit Prince,” I said, trying to keep from crying.
The next words she spoke were said in a loud and staccato voice: “Lin-tang. Remet-le. Right now!”
Trying to hold back my tears as best I could, I returned the book to its place on the shelf. But just as I was doing that, I caught sight of another book, The Mahabharata, a condensed version of the story by R.K. Narayan. O, mon Dieu! Excited by the find, I hesitated, not knowing what to do. With a trembling hand, and stealing a glance at my mother, who was standing near the front door with an annoyed look on her face, I removed the book from the shelf. As I quickly leafed through the book, the names “Shrikand” and “Ekalavya” jumped out at me. Taking the book, I then went to find Ayah in the poetry section. On the edge of tears, I whispered to him how much I wanted to own the book. Afraid that my tears might damage the book’s cover, I hastily wiped my cheeks with the sleeve of my blouse. No more than five seconds passed before Ayah had taken the book from me and paid for it at the cash register. Maman said nothing; she only blinked, but I could guess what would happen later.
Throughout the walk home, the two of them trained their eyes in opposite directions. I knew that no amount of fried rice the next morning, no matter how good it tasted, would be able to make them smile or to laugh at the silliness of their behavior.
There was something much deeper going on than just the issue of Ayah’s purchase of The Mahabharata, which I read from cover to cover that very same night. Starting then, I realized that Ayah and Maman were faced with a much larger problem, one that I would never know because, as Maman often said to me about friends of theirs: “It’s useless to even try to pretend to know or understand what goes on between a husband and wife. Only they know what problems are affecting them.”
When I read Ekalaya’s story, at the moment he cut off his thumb to obey Dorna’s wishes, I started to cry and couldn’t stop. At my age of just ten years, I didn’t know that I was crying because I sensed somehow that I was facing a loss as great as that of Ekalaya; or possibly that I suddenly had a premonition that my days of watching films with Ayah and Maman in the open air were coming to an end. A winter’s wind was coming which, blowing between them, was turning everything cold as ice.
Only a few months after my parents separated, I began to sense that there was “something” between my father and Indonesia that could never be replaced by anything or anyone. It was around then that I also came to know that he had for years, on a routine annual basis, submitted an application to the Indonesian embassy for a visa to enter Indonesia. A tourist visa, of course. By this time, as a permanent political exile, Ayah — like his three friends — had obtained a French passport. But unlike Om Risjaf, who in some magic way managed to obtain a visa to enter Indonesia, my father’s requests, and those of Om Nug and Om Tjai as well, were always rejected.
The officials at the Indonesian embassy never gave a reason for their rejection. Nor did they explain why Om Risjaf was being treated differently even though he, too, had been among those whose passports had been revoked when they were in Havana.
Every time he learned that his visa applications had been rejected, Ayah would take Ekalaya from his place on the wall and play with the puppet. He’d go off by himself, to sit alone in his room and read old letters, from whom I didn’t know — a personal territory I did not want to know. When that happened, if it happened when I was spending the night at Ayah’s, I would try, as best as I could, to open for him a space in myself in which to store his sadness.
It was later still that I came to understand that there was something in the character of Ekalaya that gave Ayah the strength to survive. After having at first been rejected by Dorna, Ekalaya had found his own way to study with the teacher. Every day, prior to his practice, this noble knight would bow before his teacher — even on that final day of instruction when the duplicitous Dorna asked Ekalaya for his thumb, which he willingly gave. Ekalaya knew that regardless of Dorna’s rejection, the world of bowmen would accept him. He was, after all, the best bowman in the entire universe — even if in the Mahabharata Dorna had awarded this title to Arjuna, his personal favorite. Ayah knew that even if the Indonesian government rejected him, he was not being rejected by his country. It was not his homeland rejecting him. And that is the reason he stored a pile of cloves in the one large apothecary jar and several handfuls of turmeric in the other one that sat on the bookshelf in his living room. From them emitted the scent of Indonesia.
Around the time I was twelve, after all the visa rejections, the clove-smelling ceremonies, and Ayah’s repeated reenactment of Ekalaya’s tale, I had to conclude that Ayah was Ekalaya. He might be rejected, but he would survive even if his steps were marked by wounds and blood.
VIVIENNE DEVERAUX
LE COUP DE FOUDRE… Who believes in le coup de foudre? Love at first sight is a romantic phrase held dear to the heart by those same people who think that Paris, City of Light, has a never-ending supply of amour.
I was born into the family of Laurence and Marianne Deveraux. My father is a man who believes in reason and that life ends when the heart stops beating and the oxygen tube for artificial resuscitation is removed. All those stories about life after death were, for my family, a romantic notion on the part of people who believe that humans are immortal beings. Such people want to extend life, something that is, by nature, finite. They don’t want the thread of life to be broken or for it to end in uncertainty. I believed then, and I believe now, that life is transitory, that it will end one day. My family were deviants among the Deveraux clan, Roman Catholics mostly who spent their Sundays going to church and sharing a communal meal.
Given this way of thinking among my immediate family, people who lived and worked for the day, I obviously did not believe in le coup de foudre. How could you fall in love with a person you’d only just met? Or someone whose eyes you’d only just seen? Not likely. Jamais!
According to Indonesians I later came to meet, my attitude was kualat. This word, originally of Arabic derivation, was one with no direct equivalent in French. Dimas tried to explain its meaning to me, which was, approximately, that I was in some way doomed to a particular fate because of something I had done or spoken. Specifically as regards to me, the situation did not prove to be calamitous. I was kualat because my own words turned against me.
May 1968 was an important time not only because of the students and workers’ revolution in Paris; it was also then that my arrogance was shattered and I was forced to believe in le coup de foudre.